Happy New Year

street photography

31 Dec

Happy New Year – A Photography Year of Encounters and Traces

It feels strange to thank a year that has just ended when it seems like I barely had the time to really hold onto it.

2025 was full—densely packed with beautiful things—so many that it’s hard to line them up in my head now. Everything passed by so quickly that I almost didn’t notice it happening. A bit like when you’re driving across Sardinia and, from the side of the road, you see a nuraghe appear and disappear in a moment. You know it’s there, you recognize it, but it slips past before you can really stop and look.

(It’s an image that’s only personal to me, I know. You can replace the nuraghe with whatever makes sense to you. A giraffe, if you’re in the savanna, or a samurai if you’re in Japan)

These last few weeks, instead, have been very quiet. I took the time to rearrange things at home, scan some film, and put some order back into small details I had left behind, and to slowly work on projects for the year ahead.

I haven’t written on the blog in a while. Maybe because, after the artist residency in November, I started wanting to look at everything more at my own pace. And my pace, since returning to Tokyo, has slowed down a little—for now.

I already know it won’t stay this way forever. I know myself. The metronome will start clicking faster again at some point. And that’s fine too: I feel good even when things speed up. But right now, I’m enjoying this slower tempo, this stretched time where ideas have room to settle.

So here I am, sitting and asking myself a simple question that isn’t really simple at all:

What actually happened this year?

If I had to choose just one thing, I’d say 2025 was the year of encounters.

Encounters I was looking for, encounters that happened by chance, encounters that left a deep mark, and others that seemed small at first, but quietly changed something. New people, unexpected returns, conversations that were brief but sharp and precise. It felt like a year in which many things came not only from plans, but from crossings.

That’s probably what I’m carrying with me into the new year: the desire to stay open. To keep photographing, observing, without forcing the direction too much and feeling my way in. To leave space for encounters and if possible the time to understand what they really are- and that is the difficult thing.

To those reading these lines as a New Year’s wish, a greeting, or just a short pause in the middle of their day, thank you.

For having been there, for being here now, or simply for passing by—like a nuraghe glimpsed from a car window. (^^)